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No to Gonzales
Moon of Alabama wholeheartedly supports the call by dailyKos to oppose Gonzales’s nomination as AG. Torture is evil, it is illegal and an explicit proponent of torture should certainly not be AG of the US.
(The link to this post has not been provided to dailyKos. See below the fold for the earlier version of that post and the comments section for the discussion on whether we should have linked or not)
Sorry for the two very close posts, but DailyKos has posted a very strong call to oppose Gonzales’s nomination as AG and is asking for links from blogs that support that position.
My question is simple – do you agree to provide a link to our site for this call?
<update (Bernhard)>
It is a duty to be against Gonzales as AG, no matter how many trolls may come to this blog or whatever. Listen to your grandma’s story:
Another case involved a 73-year-old Iraqi woman who was captured by members of the Delta Force special unit and alleged that she was robbed of money and jewels before being confined for days without food or water — all in an effort to force her to disclose the location of her husband and son. Delta Force’s Task Force 20 was assigned to capture senior Iraqi officials.
She said she was also stripped and humiliated by a man who "straddled her . . . and attempted to ride her like a horse" before hitting her with a stick and placing it in her anus. The case, which attracted the attention of senior Iraqi officials and led to an inquiry by an unnamed member of the White House staff, was closed without a conclusion.
WaPo
Someone in the White House jacked off over the case file but could not come to a conclusion. Sad story indeed. Folks like Gonzales make you impotent and sick.
Same goes for Rice by the way and anybody else who facilitates this madness and of course for these self named Dems who endorse such people for cabinet posts in the Senate or House.
</update (Bernhard)>
As we all of us here, most intimately, collectively, growing as we are together like a fragile plant or a delicate bud threatened by hoar frost, as we huddle here facing the most cataclysmic, terrible, blood soaked times humanity has ever known, the urgency I feel, the rage at this immoral, unjust behemoth that is rolling along crushing all in its rapacious and cruel advance, as we here, this band of us, this noble experiment, this collection of seekers after just the perfect quotation or the teasing out of an obscure footnote, as we each of try, in our own individual yet connected ways to introduce once more to the light the literary works of old, dead white men, I think that there is nothing more important than that we, any of us, here, growing as we are in all our fragility yet connected for all time by our revulsion to and detestation of, these horrible, horrible things that we all rage here about, I think there is nothing more important for us to do than to demonstrate our eclectic reading, the extent to which, indubitably, our thoughts, our perceptions, the very codes we live by, the sacred political philosophies we hold most precious, have been forged and formed in the furnace of dusty old libraries and in solitude in our own rooms as we wrestled with dull tomes written by men (and, in deference to the tender sex, occasionally, with very little assistance from men, by women), who have poured their minds into confronting some of the most pressing, urgent, crucial questions of our age. Or, to be more exact, of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. It is essential that we, us here, this pilgrim band of souls we are, be adequately equipped to understand the complexities of these discussions, so that should any of us happen to find ourselves transported back – and no doubt such a thing is perfectly feasible given the ruthless and demonic machinations of the Bush junta in all its Satanic ferocity – should any of us find ourselves transported back to the 16th, 17th, 18th 19th or early 20th centuries they will be able to understand the key philosophical questions of the day and perhaps gain admittance to the elegant soirées where fine minds probe such issues. I think it was Rousseau who once said (or it might have been Sartre, or Durkheim, or Althusser, or perhaps it was Jacques Derrida – or Hobbes), “Please may I have some Camembert?” on the occasion of entering a small shop in Paris. Which is to assure, and reassure all here who are a part of this precious, delicate, fragile, community that these great men, these great dead white men, were unafraid to face the world and go down into the streets and demand – politely of course, and with the requisite amount of capital on hand to facilitate a smooth and mutually satisfying transaction between frommagerie and éminence grise – cheese. I think it is vital that as we grow here we pay respect to each other. I understand that there are those here, for instance, who might prefer Brie, or Stilton, or Wisconsin Port Salut or even the humble Cheddar. I do not reject their right to favor those cheeses and while I might disagree violently, in a manner of speaking, with their selection of other brands I will fight, in the manner of Voltaire, for their right to choose them, provided of course that they have the wherewithal to do so and do not intend committing any criminal act or invite unwelcome attentions from the authorities upon themselves and all who associate with them, even in as loose an association as this burgeoning, blossoming, tender, delicate community of name-droppers, quote hurlers, chapter and verse preachers and hair splitters. And above all, no matter what the beauty and the benefits of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite are – and we can discourse another day on how Grieg’s music perhaps unfairly eclipsed Ibsen’s literary accomplishment – we don’t want anything to do with trolls. A community such as ours, a growing, living, fragile itsy-bitsy potpourri of weak and delicate minds that are – and I disparage no individual here – unequipped to trade quotations about old dead white men – is ill prepared to venture forth and make, valid, honest criticism about issues of contemporary relevance and actually take steps to register displeasure at the appointment to high office, anywhere, of the architects of policies bringing sodomy, rape, beatings, humiliation and excruciatingly painful mind ripping torture to tens of thousands around the globe. While we have none of us succeeded in deciding whether a revolutionary vanguard is essential to our development here, and if so whether there should be a membership criterion like an oral examination on familiarity with the seminal works of elderly, deceased unpigmented homo sapiens of the male gender, or if a guerrilla foci – a hypothetical one I hasten to add – is a better means of ensuring collective indoctrination here (and there has been absolutely no discussion of who will sell the party newssheet, if we ever agree that such a means of spreading our message is desirable, or whether vendors should receive financial emoluments or posting privileges that allow them to omit mentioning Marx or Descartes or Camillo Torres or Ivan Illich or Noam Chomsky, an idea that makes me shudder with revulsion but which may prove to have its attractions to some of the hoi polloi), while we have not succeeded in creating a group mindset and perhaps, at a later stage, designed a uniform that all who surf in here can wear while posting, I think that any attempts to engage with the real world and do anything positive in it are ingredients for a recipe for disaster. We are secret rebels and if we are to maintain our community of fragile, burgeoning, blossoming, growing comrades, united by our abhorrence of the bloody evils stalking the earth and crushing the innocent underfoot as their screams and cries of death and despair pierce the very marrow of our bones it behoves us all to do absolutely nothing about it. Except, of course, find an apposite quotation.
Posted by: Forgetting cant | Jan 26 2005 23:40 utc | 58
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